Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (2003) (30 page)

As for Camp David, Erekat emphasized that he and Arafat had begged Clinton for more time to prepare before starting the talks, but to no avail. Clinton was in the last six months of his presidency, and Barak was hoping to use the talks to strengthen his weakening position in the upcoming Israeli elections. Erekat noted that it had been the Palestinians who made some of the imaginative proposals such as swapping land in Israel with the Palestinians in exchange for incorporating some of the major West Bank settlements into Israel proper. He also stressed that the Palestinians knew the Israelis could not accept a massive return of all refugees, and had therefore suggested optional return mechanisms that would allow the PLO to claim to its people that it had addressed this very emotional issue, yet avoid flooding Israel with new Palestinian arrivals. Finally, although he admitted that failure to reach closure on the Clinton proposals had caused difficulties, he also insisted that the two sides had been very close to agreement at Taba, only to fail because of Barak’s imminent election defeat. He adamantly denied that Arafat had ordered the second intifada. After the breakdown of Camp David, he said, when it became known that Sharon planned a walk on the Temple Mount that was bound to antagonize Palestinians, Arafat had gone to Barak’s home and begged him to stop the walk, saying he couldn’t control the consequences. Moreover, Erekat noted that the first shootings, after the inevitable demonstrations generated by the Sharon walk, were of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers, and that in the first few months of the intifada nearly all of the dead were Palestinian youths.

To see the Palestinian picture fully, it is important to look at several points more closely. First, outside observers confirm and even strengthen Erekat’s comments about the economic and social situation. The leading Israeli newspaper,
Ha’aretz
, has noted that more than a fourth of Palestinian students are no longer able to go to school,
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while the UN and other international agencies report $4 billion in Palestinian losses of various kinds in an economy that had a GDP in 1999 of only $3.5 billion. Much of this loss appears to be due to the Israeli army’s destruction of orchards or buildings that might provide cover for possible Palestinian attackers near settler roads.
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The UN also reported declines in admissions at Palestinian hospitals and in performance of various medical procedures on the order of 30 to 70 percent, along with increasing signs of malnutrition in children.
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This is almost entirely due to curfews and restrictions on movement within the West Bank and Gaza. In short, the Palestinian economic and social situation is even more of a disaster than that of Israel.

A second point is that while Israeli-Palestinian interactions in the occupied areas are bound to be irritating under the best of circumstances, they are worsened by the fact that settlers are subject only to Israeli courts, and the Israeli military has broad latitude to seize land for security purposes. The UN Human Rights Commission found that Palestinians have little hope of restitution from Israeli courts for damages from violence committed by the increasingly militant settlers. They have no hope at all when the damage is done by the military. The situation is often so bad that a movement has grown up within the Israeli military of soldiers who refuse to serve in the occupied areas. Says David Zonsheine, the leader of this group, ‘You stand at a checkpoint, and you know that Israeli settlers go right through and Arabs don’t, and you remember South Africa.’
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Even more striking are the comments of former Israeli negotiator Uri Savir, who wrote of his surprise at discovering in the Oslo pre-ne-gotiations that a Palestinian ‘couldn’t build, work, study, purchase land, grow produce, start a business, take a walk at night, or visit his family in Gaza or Jordan without a permit from us.’
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The myth of an ‘enlightened occupation’ had hidden all this from him.

The final point is the complex politics of the Palestinians. Because he has come to symbolize the Palestinian movement, and also because Sharon paints him that way, Arafat is seen by much of the world as a kind of dictator in full control of every Palestinian movement. The truth is otherwise. Arafat is the head of the PLO and the chairman of the Palestinian Authority, the executive body established under the Oslo process to administer the areas that were to be relinquished gradually by the Israelis. He also presides over the Palestinian Parliament, described by Nissim Calderon of Tel Aviv University as the most democratic in the Arab world. But he has at least three powerful challengers. The first is Hamas, a group that ironically was initially created with support from Israeli officials hoping to weaken Arafat. It has certainly done that but not as the Israelis perhaps hoped. Linked to international Muslim groups that run large charities and are amply funded, Hamas in Israel has two arms, a charitable one providing food, medicine, and other help to the poor, and a military one that specializes in suicide bombings. Islamic jihad is a less well-organized group, but with the same militant Islamic philosophy and the same terrorist modus operandi. Hezbollah is another militant Islamic group. Founded in Lebanon, it has ties to Iran and operates much like Hamas, with both military and charitable arms. All these groups are philosophically dedicated to the destruction of Israel and have no interest in peace or a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza. In demanding all or nothing, they are the mirror image of the Israeli hawks who favor Eretz Israel.

Israelis and many Americans often say that Arafat wants it all too, and at one time he probably did, but most experts agree that in the Oslo process Arafat decided, however reluctantly, to accept the fact of Israel and to seek a separate Palestinian state. Thus for him and the Palestinian Authority, the fight with Israel is essentially over land, not existence. But Arafat’s failure to get any land has given rise, as Palestinian pollster Khalid Shikaki notes, to an increasingly powerful young guard that is challenging the old PLO leadership. This generation is not necessarily dedicated to the erasure of Israel, but it increasingly believes the Israelis will not halt the occupation until the price becomes too great for them to bear.

In this dynamic, actions by Sharon and Bush that weaken Arafat and frustrate achievement of legitimate Palestinian objectives feed resentment that greatly strengthens Hamas and all the other challengers. That Sharon knows this, and continues to squeeze Arafat, has led all Palestinians and a lot of Israelis to believe that he prefers to make the fight truly existential, in order to unite Israel in a war that will push the Palestinians into Jordan and eventually realize the borders of Biblical Israel. Many in the region fear that a U.S.-led war on Iraq will give Sharon the cover to annex the West Bank while cleansing it of Palestinians.

Not Getting to Peace

The current conflict is rooted in the late nineteenth century, when Jewish leaders like Theodore Herzl, Leo Pinsker, and Moses Hess became convinced that the only way for Jews to escape pogroms and discrimination was to have their own nation in the ancient homeland of the Jews around Jerusalem. Beginning in 1878 they began arranging for European Jews to emigrate into Palestine, then part of the Ottoman empire. These early Zionists seemed not to recognize an indigenous Arab presence and spoke naively of ‘a land without people for a people without a land.’
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Friction with Arabs arose quickly as it became clear that the newcomers did not intend to become part of the local life but aimed rather to create their own separate and very different society. Chaim Margalit Kalvarisky, who managed the Jewish Colonization Association, said he felt compassion for the Arabs and twenty-five years of dispossessing them was hard, but the Jewish public demanded it. The Jewish philosopher and writer Ahad Ha’am stated prophetically, ‘We have to treat the local population with love and respect… And what do our brethren in the Land of Israel do? Exactly the opposite… They behave toward the Arabs with hostility and cruelty… Should the time come when the life of our people in Palestine imposes on the natives, they will not easily step aside.’
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World War I resulted in a crucial new development for Palestine, as British Foreign Minister Lord Balfour, in an effort to marshal Jewish support for the allied cause in Europe and the United States, issued the ‘Balfour Declaration’ saying Britain would support the ‘establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish People.’ He added that ‘Zionism, good or bad, is of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.’
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Unfortunately, that was not the opinion of Henry McMahon, Britain’s High Commissioner in Egypt, who was trying to incite an Arab revolt against Germany’s allies, the Ottoman Turks. In a letter to Arab leader Sharif Hussein, McMahon promised independence to the Arabs in the Ottoman-ruled provinces if they would rise up against the Turks. He also sent T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) to help organize the uprising.

These conflicting promises collided at the Versailles Peace Conference. Despite his devotion to national self-determination, President Wilson noted that ‘undeveloped peoples’ would need ‘guidance’ from administering powers under mandates from the League of Nations.
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The British, having long ago forgotten Lawrence and the Arab revolt, pushed to get the mandate for Palestine. Wilson’s King-Crane Commission was sent to investigate local sentiment and found strong opposition to the Zionist program among the area’s Christian-Muslim majority as well as a desire for an American mandate. This idea was opposed by the Zionists, who surmised that America would insist on majority rule that would put Arabs in control. They thus preferred Britain and the Balfour Declaration. (This prompted Tom Segev to note that ‘the Zionist dream ran counter to the principles of democracy.’) Wilson went along, and Britain wound up in charge of Palestine.

It was an unhappy tenure. As immigrants poured in from Europe, tensions with the Arab population led to frequent riots. Eventually, the British tried to restrict immigration, but this caused conflict with the Zionist groups. These problems got lost in the tumult of World War II, but with the end of the war millions of Holocaust survivors turned their steps toward Palestine. Now fearful of massive displacement, the Arabs resisted further Jewish immigration and the British again imposed restrictions. At that point the Irgun, the Jewish underground army that had been fighting Arabs, turned its guns and bombs on the British, who turned their mandate back to the UN and left in 1948. The UN (at that time a body of fifty-six mostly western and Latin American countries) came up with the original two-state solution by proposing to divide Palestine into Jewish and Arab entities with Jerusalem internationalized. The Arabs rejected this plan, declared war on the newly formed Israel, and lost, leaving Palestine and Jerusalem divided along an armistice line that now constitutes the internationally recognized Israeli border. About 750,000 Palestinian refugees from the area that was now Israel were left stranded in camps on the West Bank, in Gaza, and other countries like Jordan and Lebanon.
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From then until now the conflict has waxed and waned more or less continuously, and from this history has grown the Arab sense of injustice, the longing for ‘return,’ the Israeli sense of be-siegement, and the continued muddling of the international community.

Nothing fundamental changed until 1967, when the Six-Day War left Israel in charge of the West Bank and Gaza and gave rise to the Israeli Settler movement, setting the stage for decades of struggle, terrorist attacks, war in Lebanon, UN resolutions calling for peace negotiations and Israeli withdrawal from occupied territories, and various peace talks. The first intifada of 1987-1989 and the Gulf War of 1990-1991 actually began to create movement. An uprising of Palestinian young people throwing stones against the now twenty-year-old Israeli occupation, the intifada gained sympathy in the international community and also among Israelis, many of whom were questioning the morality of the occupation and the settlements. The Gulf War highlighted the urgency of settling the long conflict. The first President Bush called for a peace conference in Madrid and also for a halt to settlement construction, which U.S. aid inevitably was underwriting. Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was a ‘big Israel’ man and steadfastly refused to freeze settlements, whereupon Bush suspended certain aid flows to Israel. The Madrid conference produced little, but it did get Israelis and Palestinians talking directly to each other for the first time, and the cutoff of aid played a role in Shamir’s election defeat by Yitzhak Rabin, who continued the talks secretly until they resulted in an agreement between the two sides at Oslo in August 1993.

The Oslo arrangement committed the Israelis to gradual withdrawal of their army from some occupied areas and to transfer some authority for things like education, health, and police to the Palestinians. It committed the Palestinians to recognition of Israel’s right to exist and to renunciation by the PLO of all acts of violence. The gradual transfer of limited authority was to lead to a permanent settlement based on Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. The initial Israeli withdrawals were to be from Gaza and the Jericho area. As long as Rabin was in charge, things moved as agreed, if slowly. But after his assassination by an Israeli fanatic in late 1995, the process began to unwind. The heart of the difficulties was two hidden assumptions in the deal. Although the Israelis had made no written commitment, it was expected that expansion of settlements would be halted since their continued growth was clearly against the spirit if not the letter of the deal. By the same token, while the PLO had undertaken to renounce its own violence, the Israelis expected it would also stop that of Hamas and other groups. In the event, the settlements more than doubled over the years of the Oslo process and although violence diminished dramatically – to the extent that the Israelis became the high rollers at the Jericho Casino – it did not disappear.